United as They Journeyed Back in Time

By RACHEL LEE HARRIS

June 8, 2014

Joanna Amy Brooks and Marcus Andreas Klostermeyer are to be married Sunday afternoon by Cantor Leslie Friedlander at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx.

The bride, 27, is a legal assistant for the New York City Business Integrity Commission in Manhattan, an agency that regulates and licenses businesses operating in New York’s public wholesale markets and commercial waste industries. She graduated from Dartmouth.

She is a daughter of Faye Dottheim-Brooks and David M. Brooks of Manhattan. The bride’s father is the president of Just Bulbs, a retail and commercial light bulb store in Manhattan. Her mother is a lawyer in the Manhattan office of the Hartford Financial Services Group, an insurance company and investment firm based in Hartford.

The groom, 31, works in the private banking and wealth management division of Credit Suisse in Zurich, where he manages client investment reports and monitors their accuracy. He graduated from the Munich University of Applied Sciences, from which he also received a master’s degree in business administration and mechanical engineering.

He is a son of Barbara Klostermeyer and Rudolf W. Klostermeyer of Rechtmehring, Germany. The groom’s mother is a psychologist for the Rosenheim school district in Bavaria. His father is an independent software developer specializing in programs to track production at midsize manufacturing companies.

The couple met in November 2009 at the birthday party of a mutual friend in Munich, where Mr. Klostermeyer was pursuing his master’s degree and Ms. Brooks, the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship, was researching the looting of art and Judaica in Bavaria by the Nazis during World War II.

Over the next few months, they saw each other while socializing with friends but did not begin dating until Christmas, when Mr. Klostermeyer, learning that Ms. Brooks was spending the day alone, offered to keep her company, even though she didn’t celebrate the holiday. They both admitted to feeling slightly insecure in the beginning, but they continued seeing each other nonetheless.

“I did and still think she is so interesting,” Mr. Klostermeyer said. “A day with her is never boring.” She was also the first Jewish person he had known and he was touched by how open she was about her family’s history, sharing with him the story of how her grandfather had fled Germany for St. Louis in the late 1930s and about the 17th-century Torah breastplate that was stolen from her great-grandfather by the Nazis and then discovered in the attic of a deceased Nazi officer in the 1990s. It was returned to her family in 2001, an event that inspired her first trip to Germany in high school, her subsequent studies in art history and German at Dartmouth, and her current research.

“He was open to everything and wanted to learn about it all, and that made me care about him even more,” she said of Mr. Klostermeyer. “My Judaism is very important to me, especially given the things I was researching, and to find someone who wasn’t Jewish but was interested and wanted to be involved, I found very important.”

During their first year of dating, he accompanied her to Poland on a research trip to Auschwitz, where records showed that several of her relatives had been killed there. “It was a very moving, emotional experience for both of us,” she said. “It wasn’t a topic that was easy for either of us to talk about, but the experience brought it out into the open and allowed us to have conversations that were probably necessary for us to have as a couple.”

For Mr. Klostermeyer, the trip was eye-opening.

“We learned about the Holocaust in school, but it wasn’t something you talked about with friends,” he said. “It is considered the history of a different generation,” he added, although his grandparents were uprooted several times during the war. Seeing her family’s personal connection to Auschwitz was terrible, but it also made him feel more a part of her life, he said. “I got the feeling she would only have shared that with someone important to her.”

She added: “To come at it from such different perspectives and then talk about what we each were thinking and how we were both taking it all in was very bonding to us. It was a terrible and upsetting part of Germany’s history, but it is our shared history; the Jewish and German histories are very intertwined.”

Ms. Brooks continued her work in Munich until January 2011, and then moved back to New York, where Mr. Klostermeyer visited. He took part in his first Passover Seder and celebrated his first Rosh Hashana with her family.

“What they find so wonderful about Marcus is that he’s interested and wants to be involved,” she said of her parents. “He wants to participate.”

His parents “were as excited as I was and am about her,” he said. “She’s very interested in Germany, which I find wonderful, and she doesn’t judge people or a country by its history.”

In December 2012, he proposed at JoJo’s Restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and she accepted without hesitation. They will have a Jewish ceremony incorporating an 18-century Kiddush cup that was made in Germany and carried to the United States by the bride’s grandfather when he fled.